Richard III: DNA analysis on remains raises questions over royal succession
I am fascinated by Richard III his bones are proving revelatory! Born in rural Northants, raised in rural North Yorkshire and killed in rural Leicestershire. It appears in addition to really being a hunchback his descendants were not all they seemed to be – read on…
Scientists studying the DNA of Richard III, the Plantagenet king whose body was found buried beneath a Leicester car park, have revealed that there was marital infidelity among his aristocratic relatives.
Paternity tests on the DNA of a living male-line descendant of Richard III’s royal lineage have failed to find a match, which points to some royal person being born on the wrong side of the bed sheets, the researchers revealed.
The latest research into the DNA extracted from the 15th century skeleton shows unequivocally that the remains belong to Richard III, who died in the battle of Bosworth in 1485, said Turi King of Leicester University, the lead author of the study published in Nature Communications.
“Even with our highly conservative analysis, the evidence is overwhelming that these are indeed the remains of King Richard III, thereby closing an over 500-year-old missing person’s case,” Dr King said.
These findings, combined with other circumstantial evidence, give a probability of the skeleton belonging to Richard as 99.9994 per cent, the scientists said.
However, DNA analysis of the Y chromosome of Richard did not match a living descendant of Henry, fifth Duke of Beaufort, who was supposed to be related to Richard through the male line, Dr King said.